How to plug in an arbitrary view dynamically into xaml in MVVM application?

There are multiple places in my application whehe I have ContentControl placed in xaml and I do not know beforehand what its Content is going to be. What is the best practice to implement this scenario?

Right now I am considering two approaches:

Bind ContentControl.Content to view model and use a dictionary of DataTemplates to find an appropriate view. My issue with this approach is that even if I were to list all the possible combinations in a dicitonary, in some cases I simply do not know an exact type of view (or viewmodel if there is any) at compilation time. I think, I am also going to have troubles using this approach for hosting non-WPF content.

Create some sort of an interface:

interface IContentPlugin : IDisposable
{
object View { get; }
}

and bind ContentControl.Content to IContentPlugin.View directly. I could then have multiple implementations of this interface and swap them when I need to. But this solution does not strike me as something that goes well with MVVM application, as it forces me to have references to IContentPlugins in my view models.

What do you think is the best option and why? Perhaps there is a better approach?

This is achieved by having type-specific DataTemplates (i.e. DataTemplates without a key reference) for your ViewModel types in a ResourceDictionary local to the scope of the ContentControl.

Be aware though that you will need to scope the ResourceDictionary quite carefully in the case where a single ViewModel can have multiple Views associated with it.

Update:

The reasons to use implicit View determination are:

In general, the View resolution look-ups are faster than if you were to write a View resolving service.

You're not duplicating effort by writing your own View resolver which you then need to plug into the WPF runtime.

You should be telling the external source what you support and in this case, keep it always to WPFResourceDictionary so that regardless of the content/resources, you are able to merge it into your runtime ResourceDictionaries - this means, your external sources will need to provide the WinForms control wrappers for you.

As someone who has created a plugin framework before using this pattern, working with a conceptually "pure MVVM" implementation simplifies things considerably - external sources supply a ViewModel class and a ResourceDictionary of the resources for the VM and you let WPF do the heavy-lifting of View determination for you.

this is a very interesting scenario and for these cases I usually introduce a ViewResolverService or a ViewModelResolverService (or both). So something that can either give you the ViewModel based on a view (class,type or name) match them to host them in the ContentControl. Or a Service which can give you a view based on the ViewModel (type, or string name). With this powerful concept you can use ContentControls and/or DataTemplates and you have full control.